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Reese Witherspoon pitched him a novel
The phone call
Witherspoon and Harlan Coben were friends who had never worked together. He is not the sort of author who co-writes, the way James Patterson does, and had always figured he never would be. So he was working out how to turn her down nicely.
Then she told him the idea. He thought he could do something with it, took out a pad, and they started going back and forth. At the end she asked whether he was going to do it with her, and he told her to give it a shot. His publisher was super excited.
The ground rules
From day one he laid down a rule: this could not be done like one of those celebrity books. The only hands touching it would be theirs, nobody else was allowed in the room or to see it, and it had to be a priority. They also would not think about it as a movie or TV series.
How does co-writing a novel usually work?
James Patterson has described writing detailed chapter-by-chapter outlines that a collaborator expands into a draft, which he then revises. He co-wrote The President Is Missing with Bill Clinton in 2018 and Run, Rose, Run with Dolly Parton in 2022.
How did Witherspoon become a book-to-screen producer?
Reese Witherspoon co-founded the production company Pacific Standard in 2012 with Bruna Papandrea, and it produced Gone Girl and Wild, both released in 2014. She founded Hello Sunshine in 2016 and started a book club in 2017. A later club pick, Where the Crawdads Sing, became a film in 2022.
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